


Force and Object

by Laural_Rose



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Three-Flat Problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 15:58:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3902209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laural_Rose/pseuds/Laural_Rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A three-flat problem of character studies examining the cost and compromises required for managing Sherlock’s brilliance.</p><p>Loosely inspired by a kinkmeme prompt, something like 'Sherlock is the unstoppable force, John the immoveable object.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Equal and Opposite

**Author's Note:**

> Not Brit-picked (I'm from the other Birmingham), and not beta-ed. If you catch a mistake, PLEASE comment so I can fix it.

When Lestrade first met John Watson, he’d assumed the former soldier was so much flotsam caught in Sherlock’s wake. At their second meeting, the good doctor seemed a wind-tossed castaway who’d mistaken a fata morgana for dry land. It wasn’t until the third time that Greg recognized John for what he is.

Like a blade, Sherlock’s mind needs an edge to accomplish his work, but he had never been able to keep it sharp without honing his tongue on other people’s pride. Now, he has John for a sheath. A sheath protects the wielder (and all others) from the blade, true, but it also protects the blade itself. John is the buffer between Sherlock and the world.

John is quietly brilliant in his own right; he understands what he’s needed to protect.

Sherlock will never be temperate. He is all or nothing; an addictive personality with far more of a taste for flair and drama than Lestrade will ever be able to stomach. John is the balance Sherlock will never reach on his own. They are a matched set: equal and opposite. Until they found one another, they’d both been missing something crucial.

The sea metaphor was merely underdeveloped; John is Sherlock’s shoreline, his solid ground. Neither his tides of words, nor his innumerable stormy tirades could ever wash John away.


	2. Conductor Of Light

I am brilliant; so you say, and so it is. I did not always know it, and I do not always remember it, even with your awe-tinged reassurances floating on the air. But that brilliance can be blinding, even to me.

I do not illuminate; I blaze. My mind is no a lantern, no controlled beam of elucidation, rather it is a conflagration, racing ahead of itself, consuming all it touches until, inevitably, it must turn inward for lack of fuel.

I told you I rot in stagnation, but fermentation is an incomplete metaphor.

When the answers come, they are incandescent; magnesium flares bursting across my synapses, stealing the air from my lungs to fuel their explosive births. I am eclipsed within their shadow, and it is gloriously dark in the afterimage. This is why I crave puzzles; they temporarily bank the perpetual flames of my thoughts.

You are my conductor of light; you focus and direct me. Without you, I burn myself out. Can you not see this, John?

You give my fire a course, a path to follow, a purpose to achieve, and it obeys you. You guide me to a purpose, and protect those in my path from harm.

You carefully apportion the light I cast on others, blunting my fervor with yourself, giving me room to breathe.


	3. Storm Chaser

To John Watson, Sherlock Holmes was no mere human being; he was a force of nature.

Sherlock didn’t enter a room; he blew into it like a cyclone, uprooting everything before sweeping out again, unmindful of the chaos he left behind. To keep his hands occupied while he thought he tossed about sundries, picked up at random, unaware of his body’s actions. With sharp, biting words, heedless of the damage they’d do once loosed, he tore through people’s sense of self and self-worth. His deductions blasted out of him like headwinds. Or like projectiles a tornado cast off once they’d made their circuits.

But John knew winds; how to build windbreaks, how to put up shutters. He was careful, as he followed, to replace whatever Sherlock put down in the wrong spot, and to soothe ruffled egos in the detective’s wake.

Sherlock didn’t run through London; he soared and raged in equal measure, the tar of rooftops seemingly indistinguishable to him from the blacktop below, leaving behind a swath of devastation within the criminal element.

But wherever Sherlock flew, John was at his heels. This was when John felt most alive; racing the wind, a step away from the heart of the storm, the knowledge of the universe just beyond his fingertips. For John, to his core, was a storm chaser.


End file.
